Philly Set to Forge Ahead With New Game Coworking Space

By Jesse Whitworth

BLUE BELL, PA--It’s a crisp September Thursday. The streets of Old City Philadelphia are teeming with activity. Drexel students and tourists alike rub shoulders outside the bars and eateries along Chestnut St. Above, the eagles on the Art Deco U.S. Custom House gaze serenely out over the city. Below, a few steps down from where Third and Chestnut meet, an unassuming entryway is inset a few feet from the sidewalk. It’s marked by a simple red banner that reads “drink philly.” Now named The Drink Nation, the eponymous blog and drink special curator recently moved west to Center City. The banner probably won’t be there much longer.

The door opens on a narrow flight of stairs. On the second floor landing, there is simply two doors. To the right is the previous office of Drink Philly. To the left is Cipher Prime Studios. Cipher Prime has occupied this loft space since 2010. For the past year and a half it has also been home to Dev Night, a weekly gathering of Philly game developers who get together to game, socialize, and create. Now, with the new space opening up next door, Cipher Prime’s home is set to transform into something more.

“We’re calling it the Philly Game Forge,” says Will Stallwood, co-founder of Cipher Prime. “It’s not just us. It’s going to be everyone. Everyone’s helping out. It just happens to be our home, where we started. But, hopefully it’ll be everyone else’s home soon.”

The loft has been a great space for Cipher Prime over the past three years. In a blog post on Cipher Prime’s website from the time they moved in, Will writes, “For us, this is just our dream come true. It actually feels like we’re turning into a real company.” While the space has been great for the small four person team, one quickly gets the impression that perhaps Dev Night’s 30-40 participants are stretching the limits of Cipher Prime’s loft. But now, with Final Form Games and Flyclops moving in, and expanding into the space left by Drink Philly, that’s about to change.

“Hopefully some people can actually walk,” jokes Stallwood about the current chaos. He  describes a plan to set aside an area as a lounge, so the people there to play games, and those there to make them, each have a bit more space. That square footage will also come in handy when the Philly chapter of the International Game Developers Association starts hosting its monthly meetings here, the first of which will be October 12th.

“I talked to Matt Brenner, Chair of the Philly IGDA Chapter and Senior Game Programmer at AMI Entertainment] and we’re going to be the official IGDA meeting location now,” Stallwood says. “We’re doing the Philly Game Jam here, and I already applied, we’ll be doing the Global Game Jam here as well.”

When asked about the explosion of indie developers in Philly, Stallwood seems cautiously optimistic. “Hopefully they stay here. That’s the big important thing. I’m hoping it goes really well. I’m seeing a lot of soloists, like Greg Lobanov [2013 Winner of Philly Geek Awards’ Indie Game of the Year]. There’s a lot of that. I think it’s getting better. Five years ago, when we were getting started, there was us and [Final Form Games]. There was three of those guys and two of us. Five game developers in all of Philly that I knew about, at all, period. And now I know of over a hundred game developers. And about thirty to forty come to Dev Night. So I’m hoping that keeps growing exponentially. But I feel like it’s slowing down a little bit.”

For something that started as two friend’s weekly play date, it’s certainly seen more growth than one might expect. “We’re older now, so hanging out is harder. We have to have a designated night, and it used to be Wednesdays. So on Wednesday nights Shawn [Pierre, founder of OriGaminc] and I would just get together and we would have our ‘man date’, and just play video games. Then Keith Nieves and Zenas [Bellace], and all those guys starting showing up as well. And we just realised that all the people coming to play video games were also makers of video games, and that’s how Dev Night started happening.”

Whatever the future may hold for the Philly game dev scene, it looks like indie developers will always have a place to go. As long as studios like Cipher Prime, Final Form, and Flyclops continue to invest as much creativity and commitment back into the community as they do in their games, it’s almost hard to imagine it not growing. “We’re going to start putting on more events ourselves, basically like tournaments and stuff, for fun.” The old expression, work hard, play hard, certainly seems to hold for Philly game designers. And without the support of publishers, it makes a certain type of sense that these people, who would normally be seen as competitors, are instead investing in each other.